Today, a complete inbound lead generation strategy includes content marketing ranging from blogs to podcasts to video. While having high-quality content is ideal, what’s the point if no one’s seeing it? Optimizing each of these is crucial to ensure they’re discoverable through search engines like Google search.

Producing video content has become increasingly popular, monopolizing social media newsfeeds to the point where a one-minute video is interrupted by a 20-second video ad.

How do you ensure that your video marketing isn’t being lost in the noise?

It’s simple: video search engine optimization.

Video SEO will look a little different depending on the platform you host your videos on. Generally speaking, when uploading a video, the goal is to find relevant keywords to tag it. This allows those searching to find your video based upon the similarity between the keywords you tagged and the words they searched.

If you’re utilizing video content, there’s a pretty good chance you use Youtube.

On Abstrakt’s Youtube channel, we use a tool called VidIQ to help us optimize videos. It provides a score for our optimization efforts and recommends ways to improve, such as adding cards or more lengthy description.

If you don’t use a tool like VidIQ, no worries! Use these tips to help improve your Youtube SEO:

Metadata

Metadata includes information about the video such as the title, description, tags and annotations. This helps your video break through the noise and rank in the search results, ultimately increasing search traffic to your site.

Be sure to keep all metadata relevant to your video and be thorough with your descriptions for best results!

Closed Captions

This one’s a bit tedious, but it makes a big impact. While Youtube provides a video transcript automatically, you can go through and manually edit to ensure the right script is provided for your viewers.

Add to Playlist

Add your video to a playlist on your channel to increase the chances of being seen by your target audience.

YouTube Suggest

Type a keyword into the search bar of Youtube. You’ll want to look for long-tail keywords (multi-word keywords) that specifically relate to your video’s topic. You should also use single-word tags and broad-term tags that relate to your video’s broader topic.

When entering a search query, you should be able to see a list of search suggestions below it – those are common keywords that users are searching for.

If you put an underscore before your keyword, you’ll see suggestions for keywords that appear before your keyword. This is a simple (and free!) technique to find the popular keywords for your video.

Long-Tail Keyword Examples

How to increase video SEO

What tools to use to increase video SEO

How to increase SEO for video content

Increasing video SEO

Single Word Keyword Examples

How

What

Video

Increase

SEO

General-Term Tag Examples

SEO

Video

Marketing

Searching

Tagging

Sharing

Another way to boost SEO is to simply share your video on social media! Over 500 million (half a BILLION) people are watching video on Facebook every day (via Forbes), so it’s important to ensure video sharing is on your content calendar.

Extras

Add an end screen, a custom thumbnail and cards to boost video ranks.

Make It Public

This one’s pretty obvious, but still crucial! Make sure your video is listed at public, not private or unlisted if you want to have any shot at coming up in video search.

VidIQ does have a free version if you’re looking for more video tagging help, but hopefully, this was a start! Optimizing your videos is essential to get the best ROI possible. If you’re looking to start a video marketing strategy or just revamp your existing one, give us a shout! Our talented and dedicated team is ready to help. Check out what we’ve created so far!